In recent years, the popularity of the Internet has been increasing dramatically. Every day, more and more home users, small business users and large corporations are connecting to the Internet to improve communication. The term "Internet" (upper-case "I") refers to that particular global communications network that is in use around the world and that grew out of a U.S. Department of Defense funded research project named the ARPANet. Currently, most of the Internet is commercially owned and is an extremely complex, highly redundant network of telecommunications circuits that are connected together with routers. The "Internet" refers to a particular network of communications networks, while, in general, any interconnection of networks may be termed an "internet" (lower-case "i"). The "Internet" is one example of an "internet". Currently, the Internet is used for a variety of services including communication, education, news, advertising, reference materials, broadcast like media, financial services, and other.
Two such services available for use on the Internet include electronic mail and web publishing. An electronic mail service allows users to communicate within a company or over the Internet to remote locations. A web publishing service allows users to publish hypertext, multi-media documents and information, formatted in HTML (hyper-text markup language), to be transmitted to clients via HTTP (hyper-text transfer protocol). HTTP servers connected via the Internet are commonly referred to as the "World Wide Web", "WWW", or simply the "web". In other words, a web publishing service allows users to publish a "web site" either internally, or externally for public viewing by others on the Internet. It is contemplated that a web publishing service may also utilize other formats and protocols than HTML and HTTP, and may span other servers and networks, and not necessarily the Internet. Before a user may take advantage of either an electronic mail service or a web publishing service however, a user must be set up on, and be configured for, each of these services.
Traditionally, the set up and administration of users on a computer system has been a task separate from the set up and configuration of various services that may be utilized by users on the computer system. Typically, a system administrator is responsible for identifying new users of the computer system, assigning to them an account name, entering basic user information, and then manually setting rudimentary access privileges for certain directories on the computer system. If additional services are to be implemented on the computer system, then these additional services must be bought separately, installed separately, and then each service must be manually configured for each user of the computer system. These services might include electronic mail, web publishing, news or financial services, or local area network (LAN) services. The separate installation and manual configuration of each service for each user is a time consuming, tedious and error prone process that can be a headache for most system administrators.
For example, the set up of an electronic mail service requires adding each new user individually, and setting numerous default parameters manually such as subscriber lists, address books, address groups, postmaster privileges, and other settings that may be unique to an individual user. For web publishing services, each user must also be configured manually. The system administrator must provide web directories for each user, set permissions, and set other default parameters. In addition, should the company or the user desire a public or internal web site, the content of the site must also be authored manually by either the system administrator by a user. Creating a web site from scratch can be a difficult process for the average employee in a company who is unfamiliar with web authoring software or the location of the web site directories. Even the addition of a local area network requires default parameters to be set for each user regarding system security, centralized authentication, and other parameters. Again, a system administrator must set up an account for each user for each of these services individually. Furthermore, as each of these services are separate and not integrated, each service has a different user interface, different terminology and different procedures for configuring an individual user.
Therefore, a software tool is desirable that would provide for an integrated approach to configuring various services for individual users of a computer system, and that would automatically configure each of the services for each user upon entering basic user information.